


Faith and A Thing With Feathers

by fineandwittie



Category: The Fast Saga, The Fast and the Furious
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - It's a Wonderful Life Fusion, Happy Ending, M/M, what if
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24654412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fineandwittie/pseuds/fineandwittie
Summary: In the middle of the crash, at the end of Furious1, Dom has an out-of-body experience and manages to figure his shit out.ORthe one where Dom is Jimmy Stewart and Jesse is Henry Travers
Relationships: Brian O'Conner/Dominic Toretto
Comments: 3
Kudos: 98





	Faith and A Thing With Feathers

Dom is floating, light and weightless. He feels sun-warm and easy, the way he remembered feeling at the end of his first Race Wars. Nothing could possibly hurt him here. He has no worries and no pain.

But that isn’t right, is it? He should be in pain.

Why, though? He can’t quite remember. But he knows that he should hurt.

He tries to shift, to take stock of himself in this floating whiteness, to find the place that should hurt, but he can’t move. He can’t feel anything. What happened? Where even is he? He should be…He can’t remember. Something important was happening. Had happened. Why can’t he remember?

A shadow passes across his face and Dom realizes that his eyes are closed. He opens them, relieved to be able to move even that small part of himself, and sees who is casting the shadow.

Jesse stands in front of him, grinning like a maniac, wide and carefree. But that isn’t right either. Why is that impossible? Dom blinks and Jesse’s face is overlaid with fear, tears in his eyes, and “I am so sorry, Dominic. I don’t know what I’m doing, Dom. I am so scared right now.” before it fades away, leaving just Jesse’s smile behind.

Jesse is dead. That’s what’s wrong. He’d watched as Johnny Tran and Lance Nguyen gunned Jesse down in the goddamn street. How is—Is _he_ —He tries swallowing, but can’t feel his throat. 

“Dominic, there’s nothing to fear here. No pain, no worry, nothing, but warmth.”

Dom swallows suddenly, his jaw, mouth, the rest of his face free from whatever is holding him immobile. “Am I dead, Jesse?”

Jesse laughs, childlike and golden. Dom wants to hug him, to feel that joy under his hands and try to erase the memory of Jesse’s still chest pressing into Dom’s shoulder. 

Jesse is like the kid brother he’d never had, like the son he never would. He’s always loved Jesse just a little bit more than the rest of the team. With Jesse, things had been less complicated. Their relationship had lacked some fundamental obligation, some outside pressure, that Dom had felt on all his relationships since he’d been released from Lompoc. But not with Jesse, never with Jesse. 

“Almost, Dom. But not quite. I’m here to show you how things could have been, how thing will be. Give you the specs so you can build something perfect.”

Dom blinks, not quite understanding. “Like A Christmas Carol?” His voice is weak, wobbling. He wants to shift, uneasy, but can’t feel anything below the neck.

Jesse shakes his head, smile never faltering. “Think more like It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Dom stumbles, inside his body again between one beat and the next. He nearly falls, but Jesse reaches out a hand and catches him, stronger in death than he’d ever been in life. 

And Jesse isn’t wrong, Dom thinks, it is like being Jimmy Stewart in _It’s A Wonderful Life_. 

He follows Jesse through his life, watching himself make different decisions, watching his life playing out a hundred different way. Watching himself and everyone he’s ever loved die.

Blink - and he never touched Kenny Linder, but he dies two years later, a racer himself about to win on the same circuit his father drove and the same car puts _him_ into the wall this time. Mia gets put into foster care, too young to be on her own. She ends up on the streets, before the year is out. 

Blink - and he never looked twice at Letty, Mia’s beautiful friend who had flowered when no one was paying attention and who’d had a crush on him for years. He turns inward when his mother dies, stops making connections and the team never coalesces. Vince falls in with a bad crowd and ends up inside before he was old enough to drink. Jesse ends up working for the Trans and gets dead before he gets his head on straight. Mia turns hard, alone and abandoned in an unkind world.

Blink - and he never met Brian Earl Spilner-O’Connor, the goddamn cop who destroyed his family. He goes on in blissful ignorance that somewhere in the city is a beautiful man with a mile-wide smile who was meant to love him. They pull their last heist during Race Wars and Vince still gets shot, only this time in the head, and ends up as so much road kill. Letty still crashes, but then so does Dom. His Civic ends up under the tires of the eighteen wheeler they’re meant to be jacking. They all end up in the hospital, except Leon who gets the fuck out of dodge, abandoning them and Mia to their fates. Dom ends up, not in Lompoc this time, but worse. San Quentin or Pelican Bay. He’s a repeat offender and there were guns involved. He gets twenty years. Letty gets ten, Mia five for aiding and abetting, Vince and Jesse both die. He never sees any of them again, because sometime during the second year of his sentence, one of Tran’s crew shanks him in the shower.

Jesus. 

He’s gasping by the time Jesse steps back into that white void with him, clutching at the other man’s arm to keep himself upright, reeling from the crashing waves of grief that want to swallow him. So many deaths. So much destruction. Why is he always at the center of it all? Is he really that much of a fuck-up? Can he do nothing right?

“See, Dom? Brian wasn’t the one who tore the team apart.” Jesse is still smiling, but softer now.

Dom thinks he might be crying. Feels like he’s dying, even though he’s maybe already dead. “It was me. I tore us apart. I…tore us apart.”

Jesse just shrugs. “It doesn’t really matter, though, does it? Vince is in the hospital. He’s going to be fine. Letty and Leon escaped. Mia’s not involved and I’m gone. The only ones left are you and Brian. Let me show you something better. Dominic, let me show you something that might lessen your fear.”

Somehow, Dom doesn’t think that Jesse was talking about the growing twist of terror in his gut that whispered insidious things into his ear, that said he’d never make a choice that wouldn’t end in carnage, that he’d never be able to protect anyone, that his parents would hate what he’d done to their family, _hate him_. Dom’s almost certain that will ever lessen that.

The look on Jesse’s face says that he can follow Dom’s train of thought and the other man shakes his head. That smile softens another little fraction. “Watch.”

Dom turns to follow Jesse’s gaze and sees himself trying to climb out the window of the wreck of his father’s Charge. Brian is there, helping him, holding him, watching him with a kind of single-minded devotion that Dom has never seen before. Dom sees the fear on his own face, hears the sirens in the distance, and knows that prison is waiting for him. After all, Brian is a cop.

Only, that’s not what happens next. He watches, stunned and a little numb, as Brian takes in his fear and mirrors it. The man looks toward the sirens, knowing what’s coming, knowing what Dom is afraid of. Brian sighs and offers Dom his keys, a pained smile lingering on his lips.

Dom watches himself as he takes the keys, gets into the Supra and drives away, leaving Brian to watch him go. The agony, the sheer magnitude of loss, in Brian’s face is crushing. Dom jerks forward, wanting to reach out, wanting to stop himself from walking away, anything that could get that look out of Brian’s eyes.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat, low and wounded and whining. Jesse lays a hand on his shoulder. He squeezes and Dom looks over at him. “This is what could happen.”

And Brian is running, leaving the wreck of the Charger behind on foot, boosting a car two streets over and getting the fuck out of there. He stops at Dom’s garage, takes one of the cars that they’d been almost done with, and flees. He doesn’t go back to his apartment. He doesn’t even go back to 1327 to grab the few things that he’d left there. He just stops at an ATM to drain his bank account of as much money as they’ll let him, and drives. East, north, east again. He’s zigzagging across state lines and he doesn’t stop until he almost runs himself off the road. A night in the shittiest motel he can find and he’s gone again. He makes it to Louisiana before he dumps the car he’d taken from Dom’s. He stops at a local place, seems to know one of the mechanics there. The guy sells him a Skyline. It’s a piece of shit that Dom would be ashamed to drive, but it runs. East again.

Brian doesn’t stop running until he hits Miami and runs out of road. His face made the nightly news. He buys contact lens and grows a beard, lets his hair grow out and suddenly he’s someone that Dom barely recognizes.

It works, until he gets sick of it and undoes it all. Dom’s having trouble processing time because he can’t tell how long Brian looked like a stranger. 

In Miami, Brian makes friends. Things blur a bit for Dom, but he sees feds again and Brian’s long list of pending charges and a tall, handsome black man that tries to beat Brian’s face in. There’s a drug dealer and a beautiful woman and suddenly Brian’s record is cleared.

But Letty dies anyway and their family is broken in a way that will never be fixed. Brian loves him, is willing to trade everything away for him, over and over, but he’ll never say a word about it because Mia is pregnant and Dom walked away from him when it really mattered. Left him behind, once long ago.

Dom can’t support his own weight anymore, his legs turned to jelly and his pulse out of control. He slides to the floor and he can’t see. Can’t breath. He feels Jesse wrap an arm around his shoulders and whisper, “We’ll all be waiting, Dominic. Make things better.”

And he crashes back into the Charger, pain overwhelming. His ribs are fucked and his shoulder is dislocated. His vision blurs. “Not what I had in mind.” He hears himself say.

Brian’s dragging him out of the Charger and he’s swamped with that same fear that he’d seen on his own face. The memory and the reality are overlaying each other and he’s queasy, nausea roiling in his guts. 

“I owe you a ten second car.” 

Which is true, but not right. He can’t let all this happen again. He can’t. “Well, then you’re going to have to come with me, because I’m not taking delivery today.”

Brian’s blue eyes widen and his lips part on an exhale. He’s so beautiful, so achingly beautiful, that Dom can’t stop himself from reaching out and yanking Brian into a quick kiss. Just a short press of lips, but Dom wants there to be no confusion here. No second guessing what it is he’s asking for. What new future he wants for them.

Brian looks shellshocked, unsteady and disbelieving, but he nods. “Yeah?” He breaths out, hunger beginning to surface in his eyes.

Dom grins at him, toothy and fierce. He’s in pain and the cops are on their way and everything has gone to shit. Letty’s still injured and Mia’s still at the house with Jesse’s dead body. Their world is burning around them, but Dom thinks that it’s possible he’d never been more filled with light, with joy and hope and, yeah, love.

“I’m not leaving you behind, Bri. I’m not walking away from you. You’re part of the team. No matter what you were before, no matter how much you lied to all of us. None of it is gonna stop me loving you.” Dom always suspected that the first time he said I love you to someone that he’d be a mess of nerves.

He’s not. He knows, has seen how much, Brian loves him too. 

It’s in his eyes now, his whole face, glowing with it. “Oh…” He breaths, licking his lips, a motion that Dom tracks with his eyes. “Dom…Dominic, I—“

The wail of a siren, much too close for comfort, breaks the moment. Dom stiffens. “Jesus. Yeah. You love me too. Now get in the goddamn car and get us out of here. We do this properly when we get to Mexico.”

Brian’s smile is wide and wild, his eyes flashing with the spike of adrenaline. “No faith. Still no faith.” He mumbles and stumbles back to the Supra. Within a moment, they’re clearing the corner. Brian can see the glow of red and blue in the distance, somewhere on the other side of their chosen startline. 

Dom leans his head against the seat and rolls it to look at Brian. “Oh I have faith in you.”

Brian’s smile turns wolfish. “Ride or Die.

Dom nods, settles in. “Ride or Die.”


End file.
